They say numbers never lie. Leonard Allen would beg to differ. At age 73, the 5-foot-9-inch Harbor Island resident weighed in at a healthy 160 pounds. His total cholesterol was 114—far below the recommended level of less than 200. He kept his blood pressure and blood sugar in check and walked 3 miles every day to stay fit.

“You wouldn’t have flagged him right off the bat,” says Beaufort Memorial vascular surgeon Chad Tober, MD. “By all accounts, he was a healthy man.” But no matter the numbers, Leonard was a walking time bomb. His left carotid artery was 90 percent blocked, his right, 70 percent. “It was very likely he was going to have a massive stroke,” Tober says.

The heart beats. It pumps. It pounds. And it races. This mighty muscle works hard for you. Are you doing all you can to make its job easier? To keep your ticker in shape, start by better understanding the different conditions that can affect your heart.

More women than men have died from heart disease every year since 1984. Yet only one woman in five believes it to be her greatest health threat.

So why do women continue to overlook heart disease? “In the past, all the research was done on older men,” says BMH cardiologist Stuart Smalheiser, M.D. “But it’s not just a man’s disease; more women die of heart disease than anything else.”

When Jill Bolte Taylor was recovering from a severe hemorrhagic stroke at age 37, she says few people truly understood her needs. As a brain scientist, she had extensive knowledge about what those needs were.

“They talked to me incessantly,” she says today, “and what I needed was to sleep and preserve my energy.” One person who instinctively knew how to help her was her caregiver: her mother.